Except at that Beacon on the Hill, yup Notre Dame. You want to know something funny, coaches are now using that as grist in negative recruiting on the Irish. FSU coaches convinced Aaron Lynch he couldn't make it at Notre Dame academically, South Carolina coaches tried that on Ben Councell but he didn't buy it. Come to our school we have more diversity, our academics are easy enough for you. LOL>>> Grad Rates
That's one hell of a recruiting tactic. Tell a kid he's not smart enough to play at Notre Dame. Any kid that would accept that probably is a dummy or at least lacking in self-confidence or just plain lazy. My opinion of Spurrier just went down considerably.
And Indiana is about to hire the Oklahoma offensive coordinator as its next head coach. You would think they'd have learned from their last hire of an Oklahoma coach.
Sid I did not even think about that when I read the Press release. Hopefully Indiana will not suffer that fate twice!
Grad rates in collegiate athletics continue to be the dark side of the equation and bring a degree of shame on all.
Don, my point is that between the issues with Oklahoma's apparent lack of concern for academics and the issues of Kelvin Sampson, who should have been fired by Oklahoma before IU ever made the idiotic decision to hire him, I don't see Oklahoma as fertile ground for coaching hires. When ND was searching for a new FB coach, there were ND fans in public forums drooling over the prospect of a possible hire of Bob Stoops. I never understood that and am glad it didn't happen. He is the head coach of a program that doesn't care if its student-athletes graduate. Ergo.......you get the picture. Maybe this new IU coach is not guilty by association. For IU's sake, I sure hope not. The IU AD is a lawyer who came from a prestigious Indianapolis law firm. I hope he's smart enough to have vetted the guy thoroughly.
The problem is that the kids and parents really don't care all that much about Grad rates, if they did then they would pay more attention to the historical grad rates of schools they are considering. But instead what they really care about is playing time, getting ready for the NFL (which is as Arthur Ashe once said harder to get to than Medical School), party atmosphere, easy academics, etc.
The odds of a high school player making it to the NFL are about 1 in 1000. If you make it that far, the average career length is 3.5 years which means the average NFL player never qualifies for a pension. My son's friend who started for four years at BC is now an out of work iron worker with no degree.
Since BC joined the ACC, they've succumbed to the culture of those southeastern U.S. programs who are members of the ACC. :wink: Oh....by the way......BC sucks.
Well George you are going to have a hard time convincing me that Notre Dame doesn't say some things behind closed doors in private to recruits that would bad if they got out. Welcome to the real world and I hardly imagine that Spurrier will have his feelings hurt with your loss of respect.
Hard to believe with all those ND recruits that ended up in Gator uniforms that you don't have dozens of stories to tell. On second though, no it isn't.
The only thing I have ever heard, and I don't believe it, is that ND recruiters tell catholic school kids that Jesus and his mother Mary want them at Notre Dame. I had a Penn State fan who said he knew people close to the program and that's what they told him about recruiting against ND. The only other thing I have heard and it made the news during Charlies 2nd year I believe was that Charlie was a "negative recruiter" the accusation was made by a kid Charlie recruited but who ended up at Clemson. It was reported, shockingly by a Clemson writer in a So. Carolina newspaper. Well when people tracked this kid down and queried him about the "negative" recruiting, it turned out to be that Charlie had a spreadsheet that showed the academic rankings of the schools that he was considering (ND, Clemson, So. Carolina, UF, FSU, and a couple of others) and of course ND was #1. Also compared rankings of his desired major, which was business school and ND's undergrad business school has been in the top 5 for awhile and #1 the last couple of years. So if that's negative recruiting, so be it!! Pumpkinhead Bowden used to tell kids who weren't catholic that you had to go to Mass every morning at ND even if you weren't catholic and that they tried to convert you. Not true even for Catholic kids! If there is a straighter school than ND in recruiting I don't know about it.
Oh and by the way I don't really get upset by negative recruiting. Even when opposing recruiters tell kids the academics are too hard for them at ND, it's the job of ND recruiters to sell our schools attributes and be able and ready to show them where those guys are wrong and where ND academics will work for them their whole life and stuff like that. That's life, salesmen have to face that everyday, ie somebody knocking their product. If you run a business you are always having to make sure that your customers and prospects know all the positive things about your business. Some things that are perceived as "negative" are true. We are a school where the vast majority (90+%) are Catholic, we don't have a large minority population, esp African American, our largest minority is Latino. It is what it is. It's our coaches jobs to overcome our negatives, and by and large they do, but in some cases (Aaron Lynch) the kids just want something different and readily accept that it's too tough for them academically. If they think that, then it probably is too tough for them.
ND <t>As far as the Lynch kid is concerned, if you remember he wavered a time or two before he finally decommitted. He had mentioned before that he didn't know if he could make it academically. When the losses to navy and Tulsa happened it seemed to put him over the edge and he used that and location as his excuse. His loss, not NDs. Kelly will put ND back on track without him. Hope he does well with a FSU sheepskin in hand.</t>
It sort of seems a little sad that by "negatively" recruiting a kid by telling him that ND is too difficult for him from an academic standpoint, it's not the school but the kid that is being impuned. What they're telling the kid is "you're too stupid to go to school there."
Kid goes to school X and is told ND is too difficult. Then he goes to ND and is told how at South Bend he will be prepared to be successful in life. If this is the kind of kid you want, which school do you think he will pick? If I were y'all I'd encourage that kind of negative recruiting.
I encourage/support etc the kind of recruiting where you make your case for your school involving all the things your school has going for it. Schools like ND and Northwestern and Stanford and Duke and others who routinely graduate their players both white and minority should make sure Parents and Athletes know that about them. If kid wants to be a bus major and is considering ND vs say Purdue or Ohio State ...then to me it's not negative to point out that ND's Mendoza College of Business is and has been the #1 rated undergrad business school for several years and top 10 for a long time. I would be disappointed if they said Purdue or Ohio State B School grads don't do well or stuff like that. Merely point out the categories that ND grads do better and leave it at that. But then as a recruiter I'd probably end up with a full class of DivIII prospects!!